Gender Roles In Shakespeare's Othello

Carol Thomas McNeely had once said “ The sexes so sharply differentiated in the play, badly misunderstand each other. The men persistently misconceive the women; the women fatally overestimate the men. Each sex, trapped in its own values and attitudes misjudges the other. ” To rephrase the quote, it says that due to the misunderstanding of the fundamental needs for each gender, it confines the genders into stereotypical boxes. In the play, Othello, one of the main themes about gender roles in this play is that miscommunication between the different genders. Due to the misunderstanding between the two of the main characters in the play, it had caused a great demise for both sexes.
To start with, Othello’s anger caused him to make a foolish judgment of Desdemona’s

Othello, in this scene, is beside the bed that he and Desdemona share. He starts out on his soliloquy by breaking down crying because of what he is going to do to Desdemona. It states, “Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men. / Put out the light, and then put out the light. / If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,” (IIV. ii. 6-8) Othello, not only being a deranged heartbroken madman, he decides that he must play God with another’s person life. Othello tries to justify his heinous actions by saying that he is saving the men of the rest of the world from one woman. To Othello and his society, is seems that if a woman makes one, only one, wrongdoing, her fate is determined by that one mistake. Women in this society are seen as the lesser, and their lives as something that can be thrown away or easily blown out, like a candle. Any of the men in the play, including Othello, don’t have any respect for women and think a situation, like Othello’s, can be resolved by brutal and partisan